Can you feel it? A slight tinge in the air, dogs barking a little funny, the water tasting as if it has a smidgen of backwash in it? Yes - it's PhotoMosaic fever and it's sweeping the nation.

"What is PhotoMosaic?" you ask. Have you not picked up a Newsweek or entered a bookstore lately? It's a collage of images put together to form a bigger image (see their home page). Hundreds of flowers form a picture of Diana, thousands of Star Wars stills form Yoda, dozens of Mastercards form a dollar bill, etc.

By now you must be thinking, "It's a miraculous age we live in. This process used to take many artisans working for years in a PhotoMosaic sweatshop in Southeast Asia, their little hands cramping from the cutting and pasting. Ah, now it's all done with a computer. The AI Lab has finally come up with a useful product." But you would be mistaken. This isn't a product of the AI Lab. It's a Master's thesis from the Media Lab.

"People of the AI Lab must be very angry", you think bemusedly, "They have worked for years on PhotoMosaics, and now some young upstart comes and pulls the rug from under their feet."

Well, yes, and you'd be right. But it's not the fact that we've lost money. It's not the fact that we've lost yet another publication to those Media Lab scalawags. It's not even the fact that now we have to buy another one of those Magic-Eye like books for our coffee tables. No, it's the lost chance for research.

But, we are not without power. The key secret technological breakthrough needed to create PhotoMosaics was recently rediscovered by an intrepid graduate student - Jeremy De Bonet.

It used to be that PhotoMosaics were beyond the reach of the commoner. Only the rich and famous could afford spending $100,000 for their own personal PhotoMosaic. Now in the spirit of Free Love and bitter recriminations, you can do it for much less: simply send Jeremy ( jsd@ai.mit.edu ) an image and if he feels that you'll pay him a few bucks for it, he'll make a mosaic of it and send it back to you.

We will discuss whether PhotoMosaics are art or reductionist statements about the post-modern during this week's

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7th floor playroom December 19, 1997 5:30pm